From our ovestocked archives
Sam Smith, 2011 - More and more, living in America seems like living up in a badly
dysfunctional family. I sometimes imagine the Republicans as being a
collective version of an alcoholic, abusive husband and father while
the Democrats are the battered but comletely submissive spouse. And the
rest of us are the mistreated, powerless kids.
But as some in such situations learn, one is not powerless. You are
weak but not helpless. You have to find ways to build a new rational
reality, something that can happen even in the midst of madness.
Neither one's father nor mother - not Rick Perry nor Barack Obama -
will help with you with this. Your condition is not your fault, but
your response is up to you.
A good place to start is with the fact that dysfunction is not normal.
Test it out. Count in your own community the percent of people as
dishonest and irrational as many of our leading politicians and other
establishment figures. Yes, they're there, but typically they're in
jail, on probation or in therapy. They are not dominating the whole
culture.
Or read some history and be reminded how rare and frightening is our establishment.
I was reminded of this the other day as I spent six hours at a
community agriculture and education center where I'm on the board,
participating in a planning meeting with five farmers, a university
expert, and a cooperative extension official. During that entire six
hours nobody said anything stupid, mean, meaningless, deceptive or
destructive. They just made good sense. As I sat there, I thought: if
this were Washington I would have been out of here long ago, angry, or
sound asleep.
Yet that's the way it has always worked, Roman emperors and British
kings could make life harder or easier for the average farmer, but it
was still the demands of nature and one's response to it that failed or
triumphed. Read 1984 and you'll find that only ten percent of those in
the book lived in the distorted culture that Orwell describes. The
rest - not part of the inner and outer party - lived the lives of 1940s
English proletarians. In East Germany only ten percent of the
population were members of the Communist Party. And a woman who had
spent her childhood in Hungary during the same period once said to me,
"You know, even during the Cold War our village was run
democratically."
So here we are with only a handful of national figures making much
sense or even trying to. We have a major media that has largely lost
its ability to think independently of this elite. And we live in a time
in which everyone's visual and auditory space is overwhelmingly filled
with images that are either commercial or political fantasy and
largely unrelated to the lives we actually live each day. The diaspora
of dysfunction has swept over our lives.
And nobody can change it but us.
For each us these choices are different.
Peace activist David Swanson recently suggested one: "Small groups
(5-12 people) regularly meeting together in a format the Swedes call "study circles," to
reach consensus on the problems they face and what to do about them. .
. [Another] model permitting these study circles to knit themselves
together into an organization large enough to tackle the problems they
unearth yet supple enough to operate without bureaucracy, hierarchy, or
top-down control. This model -- "citizen's assemblies"-was
conceived by Thomas Jefferson and unearthed by one of his
African-American descendants, lawyer Don Anderson [who] wrote much of
the War on Poverty legislation."
Boycotts are yet another underused approach
And, for all our anger and distress, there is still no music
that grabs the time and gives it meaning in our hearts as well as in
our minds, as have happened so often in the past.
But most of all, we need to rediscover the local … the local that
doesn't require national legislation, national television, or national
advertising and propaganda.
There are lots of reasons for doing so. For one thing, it is
ecologically sound. Humans were not physically or psychologically
created to live in the world of presidential campaigns, offshore
banking, or Hollywood or humans massed into six or seven digit size. We
were designed to live, help, and benefit from, other real humans doing
real things. We need an ecological movement to save the endangered
species that is ourselves.
For another thing, the local is politically sound. Despite what
federally obsessed liberals tell you, nearly all important political
change has come from the bottom up. And in a time when the elites of
both parties are destroying our environment, our economy, our schools
and our democracy, the local becomes the main fort of humanity. Explore
it, test it, act with it, join it, use it and then share it what you
have found with others on the Internet.
As with the children of dysfunctional families, if we go by the rules
of those with the most power, we become a part of their madness. We
must create - on a human scale - alternative ways of being, alternative
systems and alternative solutions. As we do so, we will start to build
a new America, one that is both decent and sensible.
In the near future, of course, we can not destroy the madness at the
top. We can, however, follow the lead of the beat generation of the
1950s, once described by someone this way: "Our goal wasn't to
overthrow the establishment, but to make it irrelevant."
Not long after the beats the 1960s arrived with one the greatest era of political change in American history.
The more irrelevant we make the establishment, its theories, its
elites, its media, and its attempt to invade every corner of our souls,
the closer we will be to saving and rebuilding America.
